CNO: Technological Readiness for War ‘Not a Pick-Up Thing’

WASHINGTON —
The Navy’s top officer told a gathering of naval engineers and industry
officials that being technologically ready for war is not something that can be
achieved overnight but is the result of diligent experimentation and keeping
pace with one’s adversary.

“The technological landscape is changing so fast, across all of
technology, really fueled by this information revolution that we’re in the
middle of right now,” Chief of Naval Operations Adm. John M. Richardson said,
speaking June 20 in Washington at the Technology, Systems and Ships Symposium
of the American Society of Naval Engineers (ASNE).

“We really do
need to move apace, but what we rely on — groups like naval engineers and ASNE
— is to make sure that as we do that we move forward not on hope, not on
magazine articles, not on predictions, but move forward based on solid
engineering.

“We really do need to move apace, but what we rely on — groups like naval engineers and ASNE — is to make sure that as we do that we move forward not on hope, not on magazine articles, not on predictions, but move forward based on solid engineering.”

Chief of Naval Operations Adm. John M. Richardson

“This is the
challenge. We’ve got to move forward on an evidence-based approach.”

Technological agility was a quality Richardson stressed as necessary to
keep up with evolving threats.

Richardson said that the supremacy of U.S. naval aviation after
the Dec. 7, 1941, Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor crippled the U.S. battleships
was not a rapid development but the result of 20 years of innovation and hard
work by the fleet and such visionaries as Rear Adm. William Moffett and Adm.
Joseph Mason Reeves.

“This was not something we did as a pick-up team on Dec. 8,” Richardson
said. “We had evidence, a lot of experimentation, a lot of engineering going
into that, so that force [naval aviation] was truly ready to take on that new
mission, that new role, and it wasn’t just a pick-up thing overnight.”

“This is the way we have to move forward,” he said. “We have to continue
to get out there, experiment, prototype, get that evidence that these new
technologies are ready to carry on and take on the responsibility for the
security of our nation.

“And we have to do that at pace. We do not want to be the second Navy
armed with these decisive technologies — directed energy, unmanned, machine
learning, artificial intelligence, etc. … This is a human challenge at the end
of the day.”